Biologists and trick-cyclists at Bristol uni say they have performed experiments indicating that if British troops were to use the "dazzle camouflage" favoured for warships in the World Wars on their vehicles in Afghanistan, this would make them harder to hit with RPG anti-armour rockets, a favourite Taliban weapon.
A Spartan …

Dazzle camo warships

I might be wrong, but I thought that the reason warships were painted with dazzle patterns was to disrupt the Uboat captains ability to detect it's bearing, by making it difficult to tell apart the bow and stern and their relative angles toward or away from him?

Agreed though, that ground vehicles would likely be too slow, and critically, would be likely following a known bearing, that of the road/track they are running on.

Absolutely.

It was also meant to knacker the coincidence range finding gear warships carried at the time, who's use involved lining up two halves of an image.

The idea was that the dazzle patterns would cause the operator would line up on the fake edges of the camo (or think that a misalignment was just part of the dazzle) and get the range completely wrong.

And easily trumped...

As a former naval ossifer

you should know better, Lewis:

<The idea behind dazzle-cam is not to avoid being seen, but to make oneself harder to hit once one has been seen. It was originally meant to prevent German submarines getting an accurate idea of a warship's range, speed and heading, so causing difficulties in getting a hit with a visually aimed dumb torpedo.

From this study it becomes apparent that it never worked in the matter of causing a speed-estimation error, as warships don't go fast enough for the effect to kick in.>

It did work, quite well, in the middle of a large expanse of water with no other reference points, especially when viewed through a water streaked periscope lens 2 foot above the water line.

Not just range and bearing.

The idea was also to alter the silhouette, making the ship itself harder to identify. Probably the most successful case of this was the Bismark, which had dark areas painted to her bow and stern as well as over her superstructure. This made her look shorter from a distance. When the Bismark was breaking out into the Atlantic, she was steaming with the smaller heavy-cruiser Prinz Eugen ahead of her, when the unfortunate HMS Hood chased her down. Hood's crew opened fire on the Prinz first, being tricked into thinking the Prinz was the Bismark, no doubt partly due to Bismark's camo.

I'm not sure there is much value to camo in the Afghan conflict - the vehicles are largely stuck on known tracks/roads, and will usually be accompanied by a large dust cloud when moving at any speed. Probably a far better idea to fit stronger spaced armour, or just use drone vehicles to head up a column and take the brunt of an ambush.

Man, you know a lot about these ships

@matt bryant

Sadly not true, by the time Bismarck was making her break for the open ocean the dazzle camo and false bow-wave had been painted over. The confusion came because Prinz Eugen and Bismark were visually very similar silhouettes, and sailing in such a way that they looked the same size from certain angles.

I think they're a bit wrong

@Sgt_V3n0m: wot no Dazzle?

The Force is not strong in this one...

As a massive WWII buff, you haven't been looking very hard; many ships were covered in dazzle camoflage, from a few simple stripes to break up the Bismarck and Tirpitz (which may have been painted in and out depending on service conditions) to complex patterns on US and other vessels

ah

Well I mainly know about the Ostfront and the Western Front, not that much about the Battle of the Pacific and to a lesser extent, the Battle for the Atlantic. But it was such a massive war, and in some cases, a new kind of war (ME-262, anyone? And what about the Vampir, and the SdKfz 251/1 that supported Panther tanks that was equipped night vision devices?) that you'll learn something every time you talk about it.

Dazzle

The main purpose of dazzle camo on warships was to make them look smaller and nearer to the observer than they actually were. For this to work the camo pattern relied on long ranges and poor visibility and not on relative speed between the target and the observer.

Not quite the whole story...

At sea there was an advantage to it if you had a number of ships travelling in a flotilla, such as a capital ship and escorts.

A mass of ships, at different ranges to the submarine, would find it much more difficult to identify the ship by its outline (similar to how a herd of zebras get protection by making it hard to identify individuals)

Submarines used to have to identify the height-at-the-mast, by the elevation from the horizon, and knowing the ship type and class, to triangulate the range. Only then could speed be correctly identified, and a torpedo vector created.

A ship on its own would see little benefit from this sort of camoflage, but it did offer some protection in numbers as outines of the ships become confused, and frankly, looked pretty damn cool.

So probably totally useless for trucks and cars and aggressors with binocular vision, but pretty useful for a dumb-fired weapon shot through a mono-telescope...

I did see a rather large lady in what looked to be a battleship blitter cammo patterned dress recently, walking at speed down through the crowd in the middle of Oxford Street, to my great amusement.

Excellent suggestion

insert gratuitous joke about

Another "clever" idea....

May be a myth, but I've heard several versions of an equally "clever" idea story from the Sixties. Some boffin decided that dust clouds made APCs much harder to hit with RPGs, so he talked the US Army into trying M113s with big leaf-blowers on the front. The idea was the blowers would blow a cloud of dust in front of and to the sides of the APC, and stop any Johnny Foreigner types getting an accurate bead on the vehicle. The story goes that it wasn't until presented to the more practical Brits/Australians/Israellis that it was pointed out the dust also made it impossible for the driver to see where he was going too!

Blowing smoke @ Bryant

I suspect that is an urban legend, but there are so many types of these stories it is hard to tell.

Certainly everyone uses smoke launchers and have done for a long time. Arm the drivers and gunners with thermal cameras and they can see fine, unlike the cannon fodder trying to use rocket launchers! I suspect that dust could also interfere with this kit, thus making smoke much more practical on several levels.

Of course, many anti tank rocket launchers now have thermal sights and so tank/APC designers now have to try and reduce the thermal signature of those monsters. I believe even land rovers have smoke launchers, but there are only so many times you can use them and in Afghanistan that probably means you can't drive anywhere until the smoke clears.

Using dazzle camo is sort of a nice idea in theory, but as 90% (or whatever the real statistic is) of vehicles are taken out by IEDs not RPGs, rather pointless. Also would not work against an RPG fired from the front or rear and from what I hear, some of those Taliban RPGers are pretty damn good shots. Putting your faith in a theory that the paint might make them miss more is not a good idea! Better armour that does not add crippling weight is the answer for RPGs and quite a few exist already, hence those grills on the side of trucks etc.

Left out the 'no shit'

RE: Blowing smoke @ Bryant

As I recall, the argument for the dust-blowers was that it could produce a continuous dustcloud without the need to first spot a threat, whereas smoke grenade launchers only work the once for a short time, and then only after the threat has been spotted and the launchers triggered. If a tank had already used its smoke it was unable to hide until the launchers (all external) had been reloaded - not likely in a firefight. I think you'll also find that the smoke grenades used to produce the "instant" smokescreen on modern armoured vehicles also include particles to generate IR "fog", so your own thermal and IR kit is also blinded by them. Whether the dustcloud experiment story is true or military urban folklore is debateable, but I've heard it several times from different sources so I suggest there must be an element of truth in it.

smoke launchers

Here is an idea

Mount a rotating multi beam strobed search light on the vehicle so that as the vehicle passes Johnny Taliban, the strobe and high intensity light, causes him to misjudge the vehicles position or blinds him momentarily. A bit like the Matilda "canal defence system" but with a strobe.

Fuggit

Didn't the Japanese try this with their factories?

I saw a picture somewhere of a Japanese factory painted in a rather fetching orange and pink dazzle pattern. I guess the planes are going quite fast, but then they didn't have to use the factory as teh aiming point - so I'm not sure if it worked, or was even in widespread use.

Take a Page From History...

Cut out pages of the Quran and paste them all over your vehicle, ala the Battle of Siffin on 10th Safar, 36...or 28 July 657 for you infidels. Voila, no more RPG threat. 'Course, if that fails, see icon, attached.

RE: Take a Page From History...

The Taleban gunners are likley to be far too far away to be able to identify the pages as those from the Koran. A large slice of the Taleban are also illiterate, so they wouldn't be able to tell what the pages were even if they did get close enough. You could announce that you are pasting bits of the Koran all over your vehicles, but that would upset the locals, leading to less support from them and probably the usual Muslim riots Worldwide.

If we can fly Reaper drones over Afghanistan from the other side of the World, I don't see why we can't make drone APCs to scout out routes and act as sacrificial lambs to IEDs. RPGs I see as much less of a problem - spaced and reactive armour has been around for years and will stop most of the hollow-charge weapons the Taleban are likely to have, so why bother with silly paint schemes?

Daily Mail???

I'm a scientist me

Seems like another case of arts academics pretending there is some hint of science about their work.

Although we shouldn't necessarily discount the theory of camouflage patterns causing difficulties in tracking a target simply because this study was complete and utter bull, there is a possibility that it could maybe be useful, but I agree that it's better to not be seen at all, that said how easily can you hide a land rover in a big open desert? It's still got black tires, shiny windows, engine noise, tire noise and probably a plume of dust behind it, even at speeds below 90 kph.

I'm sure our feeble defence budget could be better spent than researching this crap (i.e. on more proven armour).

Another fine article from LP.

bootnote: mfw El Reg is using crappy new icons. You even got the trollface wrong, it's only trollface if it's facing right, facing left is coolguy and "D'oh"? You best be trollin.